The British philosopher argues that the age of large-scale migration is over — but that there’s no going back to the ‘monocultural nationhood’ of the past.
The British philosopher John Gray can always be relied upon to dispatch a few sacred cows to the slaughterhouse. Here he is, writing in the New Statesman and in splendid, characteristically bracing form, rejecting post-liberalism and advocating Hobbesian liberalism (not the contradiction that many might imagine). As usual with Gray, there were passages with which I disagreed but none that did not make me think.
A couple of extracts:
People talk — or shout — about “justice” and “rights”, but the central concepts of ethics no longer have any determinable meaning. Emotivism – the theory proposed by philosophers such as AJ Ayer, in which moral judgements are expressions of feeling with no cognitive content — has become the way we live. . . .
Science has followed the trajectory of ethics. In key branches of inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge has been subordinated to political projects in which feelings are the final authority. . . . Oppression is a subjective experience, the refusal of society to recognize and privilege a self-defined identity.
In Gray’s view, the age of large-scale migration is over (a man can dream), but he argues that “there can be no going back to the monocultural nationhood of the past.” There he is referring primarily, I imagine, to Europe. Developments in two of East Asia’s nation-states, Japan and China, would suggest that people in that part of the world have seen the consequences of mass immigration in Western Europe and are unenthused by the prospect of following suit — and unconvinced by the “birth dearth” argument that this is their countries’ only option.
I wrote a bit about this here. Since then, Japan (where the foreign-born percentage of the population is a little over 3 percent, compared with over 15 percent in the U.K. and the U.S. and 20 percent in Sweden) has a new prime minister. She is an immigration hawk, as are her party’s new coalition partners, the Japan Innovation Party. In recent elections to Japan’s upper house, Sanseito, a populist-right, “Japanese first” party, with views on immigration to match, performed very strongly. Japan, perhaps tellingly, is a country technologically well placed to understand how automation can help manage a shrinking population. Indeed it is already doing so.
China, as I’ve noted, may be headed in the same direction. One initiative there is a policy cheerfully known as jiqi huanren (replacing humans with machines). On the other hand, Beijing has announced a “K visa” program, which would be somewhat analogous to the American H1-B (as originally envisaged). But it is worth noting that, as the Daily Telegraph reported recently, this has stirred opposition that is due partly to the view that such jobs should go to Chinese (the job market for China’s educated young is not in good shape) and partly to fears of a foreign influx and what that might bring in its wake.
Let’s return to the topic of (if my interpretation of Gray’s article is correct) Western Europe, primarily. Having said that a return to the “monocultural nationhood” of the past is impossible, Gray argues that:
The issue is not how to integrate minorities into an overarching culture, but how ways of life that will remain divergent can cohabit in some sort of modus vivendi.
The way forward is to constrain communities rather than to entrench them. Everyone should be subject to a rule of law enforced equally on all. Nobody should be denied freedom to exit their community or subjected to coercion by other communities. The tyranny of minorities in stifling free expression should be firmly resisted. Individual liberty must be reasserted against the invasive claims of collective identity. But can the political will be summoned to bring about such a radical change in direction?
Good question, especially when political forces such as Britain’s Labour Party (happily presiding over a two-tier justice system) want to exploit division to perpetuate their stint in what passes for power. Labour, of course, is busily constructing what Gray refers to as a “security state” (on, it should be added, foundations built by Tony Blair and Blairite Tories over the past few decades) but one that he believes, perhaps too optimistically, will fail:
Internet censorship of the kind permitted by the recently passed Online Safety Act, on the other hand, will strengthen the forces it seeks to curb. Conflating peaceful protesters against mass immigration with the far right can only help legitimize it. . . .
A digital ID scheme [Labour’s latest initiative] will do little to improve border control while facing opposition from those who fear it as the prelude to more invasive control of everyday life. A security state that brands an emerging British majority as potential criminals is programmed to self-destruct.
We will see. Unlike some, Gray foresees not a civil war (“British society is too fragmented for that”) but rather the risk of “ungovernability.” In France, however, “civil strife may end with an authoritarian Sixth Republic.” Given how France’s left, right, and center host strong authoritarian strains, that is not impossible.
Such is the legacy of radicalized “centrism.”